y swept out the cabin for her; they dried her dishes in
desperate competition; they filled the kerosene stoves so thoroughly
that there was always a dripping trail of oil on the floor, and
Pennington had to lay down the law about it; they ate what she fed them
gladly, and even sometimes forbore to ask for more out of a wish to
seem mannerly.

And Marjorie liked it to the core. The lightening of the work was a
help, and it made things so that she was not more than healthfully
tired, though sometimes she felt that she was more than that; but,
being a woodland queen, as Pennington called it, was pleasantest of
all. She came to feel as the time went on, there alone in the clearing
with them, that they were all her property. She mended their clothes
for them, she settled their disputes, she heard their confidences and
saw the pictures of their sweethearts and wives, or, sometimes,
photographs of movie queens who were the dream-ideals of these simple
souls. Sometimes she went out to the place where they worked, before
the work moved too far away for her to reach it in a short time. And,
curiously enough, she found that she was not lonely, did not miss New
York, and--it seemed to her that it was a rather shocking way to
feel--she did not in the least feel a "lack of woman's nursing, or
dearth of woman's tears."

She got along excellently without Lucille, Cousin Anna, and the girls
in the office. And, thinking it over sometimes at twilight, in those
rare moments when there weren't from one to three of the men grouped
adoringly around her, and Francis wasn't chaperoning her silently in
the background, she felt that the work was a small price to pay for the
pleasantness of the rest of her life there. Always before she had been
a cog in the machinery, wherever she had been. At Cousin Anna's she
was a little girl, loved and dominated. With Lucille she was free, but
Lucille, in compensation, helped herself to the ungrudgingly given
foreground. But here she was lady and mistress, and pet besides. In
short, the punishment Francis had laid out for her was only a
punishment to him. She could see that he felt guilty by spells. She
thought, too, that he had times of being fond of her. How much they
meant she could not tell. But in spite of his warnings she became
better and better friends with Pennington, always exactly, at least as
far as she was concerned, as if he were a maiden aunt of great kindness
and experience. I